Year-End Lists

The Economist: The Best Books of 2025

[see also 2024 • 2023 • 2022 • 2021 • 2012]

Biography and memoir

• Buckley

  The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
  Sam Tanenhaus
• Careless People

  A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism
  Sarah Wynn-Williams
• Dark Renaissance

  The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival
  Stephen Greenblatt
• Electric Spark

  The Enigma of Dame Muriel
  Frances Wilson
• How to End a Story

  Collected Diaries
  Helen Garner
• Mother Mary Comes to Me
  Arundhati Roy
• Raising Hare

  A Memoir
  Chloe Dalton
• Storyteller

  The Life of Robert Louis Stevenson
  Leo Damrosch
• Zbig

  The Life of Zbigniew Brzezinski, America's Great Power Prophet
  Edward Luce

Business and economics

• 1929

  Inside the Greatest Crash in History--and How It Shattered a Nation
  Andrew Ross Sorkin
• Chokepoints

  American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare
  Edward Fishman
• The Corporation in the 21st Century

  Why (almost) everything we are told about business is wrong
  John Kay
• House of Huawei

  The Secret History of China's Most Powerful Company
  Eva Dou
• The Thinking Machine

  Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip
  Stephen Witt

Culture and the arts

• Fatherhood

  A History of Love and Power
  Augustine Sedgewick
• The Genius Myth

  A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea
  Helen Lewis
• John & Paul

  A Love Story in Songs
  Ian Leslie
• Lone Wolf

  Walking the Line Between Civilization and Wildness
  Adam Weymouth
• Why Q Needs U
  Danny Bate

Fiction

• Archipelago of the Sun
  Yoko Tawada
• The Eleventh Hour

  A Quintet of Stories
  Salman Rushdie
• Flashlight
  Susan Choi
• Flesh
  David Szalay
• The Lack of Light

  A Novel of Georgia
  Nino Haratischwili
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny
  Kiran Desai
• Once the Deed Is Done
  Rachel Seiffert
• Perfection
  Vincenzo Latronico
• Vulture
  Phoebe Greenwood
• We Do Not Part
  Han Kang
• What We Can Know
  Ian McEwan
• Wild Dark Shore
  Charlotte McConaghy

Food

• Caribe

  A Caribbean Cookbook with History
  Keshia Sakarah
• Chesnok: Cooking from My Corner of the Diaspora: Recipes from Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia
  Polina Chesnakova
• The Complete Illustrated Guide to Japanese Cooking

  Techniques, Ingredients & Recipes
  Sachiyo Harada
• Fusão

  Untraditional Recipes Inspired by Brasil
  Ixta Belfrage
• Italopunk

  145 Recipes to Shock Your Nonna
  Vanja van der Leeden
• Something from Nothing

  A Cookbook
  Alison Roman

History

• 38 Londres Street

  On Impunity, Pinochet in England, and a Nazi in Patagonia
  Philippe Sands
• Allies at War

  How the Struggles Between the Allied Powers Shaped the War and the World
  Tim Bouverie
• The CIA Book Club

  The Secret Mission to Win the Cold War with Forbidden Literature
  Charlie English
• The Gods of New York

  Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990
  Jonathan Mahler
• The Illegals

  Russia's Most Audacious Spies and Their Century-Long Mission to Infiltrate the West
  Shaun Walker
• The Last Days of Budapest

  The Destruction of Europe’s Most Cosmopolitan Capital in World War II
  Adam LeBor
• Peak Human

  What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages
  Johan Norberg
• The Revolutionists

  The Story of the Extremists Who Hijacked the 1970s
  Jason Burke
• Strangers and Intimates

  The Rise and Fall of Private Life
  Tiffany Jenkins
• The Third Reich of Dreams

  The Nightmares of a Nation 1933-1939
  Charlotte Beradt
• Those Who Are About to Die

  A Day in the Life of a Roman Gladiator
  Harry Sidebottom
• The Traitors Circle

  The True Story of a Secret Resistance Network in Nazi Germany―and the Spy Who Betrayed Them
  Jonathan Freedland

Politics and current affairs

• Arctic Passages

  Ice, Exploration, and the Battle for Power at the Top of the World
  Kieran Mulvaney
• Daughters of the Bamboo Grove

  From China to America, a True Story of Abduction, Adoption, and Separated Twins
  Barbara Demick
• The Highest Exam

  How the Gaokao Shapes China
  Ruixue Jia and Hongbin Li, with Claire Cousineau
• The Finest Hotel in Kabul

  A People's History of Afghanistan
  Lyse Doucet
• The Hour of the Predator

  Encounters with the Autocrats and Tech Billionaires Taking Over the World
  Giuliano da Empoli
• I Deliver Parcels in Beijing
  Hu Anyan
• In Covid's Wake

  How Our Politics Failed Us
  Stephen Macedo & Frances Lee
• The Party's Interests Come First

  The Life of Xi Zhongxun, Father of Xi Jinping
  Joseph Torigian
• Righting Wrongs

  Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments
  Kenneth Roth
• Russia's Man of War

  The Extraordinary Viktor Bout
  Cathy Scott-Clark
• We the People

  A History of the U.S. Constitution
  Jill Lepore
• When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows...

  Common Knowledge and the Mysteries of Money, Power, and Everyday Life
  Steven Pinker
• Why Nothing Works

  Who Killed Progress―and How to Bring It Back
  Marc J. Dunkelman

Science and technology

• The Age of Diagnosis

  How Our Obsession with Medical Labels Is Making Us Sicker
  Suzanne O'Sullivan
• Collisions

  A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs
  Alec Nevala-Lee
• Crick

  A Mind in Motion – from DNA to the Brain
  Professor Matthew Cobb
• Empire of AI

  Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
  Karen Hao
• Ends of the Earth

  Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future
  Neil Shubin
• Fair Doses

  An Insider's Story of the Pandemic and the Global Fight for Vaccine Equity
  Seth Berkley
• Food Intelligence

  The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us
  Julia Belluz and Kevin Hall
• Is a River Alive?
  Robert Macfarlane
• The Lost Orchid

  A Story of Victorian Plunder and Obsession
  Sarah Bilston
• The Web Beneath the Waves

  The Fragile Cables that Connect our World
  Samanth Subramanian